Sanofi is one of the better-known healthcare brands in the world for a reason. The company invests billions in R&D to develop innovative products and solutions for a broad spectrum of medical conditions.
To fulfill the company’s mission of creating healthier, fuller lives, Sanofi’s sales force must ensure that the range of their products is available in the right quantities at the right price in the right store.
However, teams faced a twin challenge: widely varying in-store execution requirements across markets, and an over-reliance on sell-out reports and manual data collection methods to understand store-level gaps and opportunities. To meet these challenges, Sanofi sought a single, consistent view of what’s happening at shelves across markets; to improve their execution consonant with their “picture of success” and to build an organization-wide culture of execution.
Sanofi has deployed Trax Retail Execution hand in hand with their Perfect Store program in 75,000 stores in over 30 countries. With Trax’s image recognition technology hosted on AWS, Sanofi’s sales reps can visit stores, take pictures of shelves and effectively digitize the stores. Sanofi’s management teams now have the revolutionary capability of viewing actual merchandizing conditions without even having to visit a store.
The ability to quickly gain visibility into accurate, objective performance metrics at a store, SKU and sales rep level has resulted in an organizational mindset shift at Sanofi. Management teams can view execution gaps down from a country level to store and rep level and develop clear and targeted store visit plans for reps and managers.
Sales reps can focus on the right things even before getting into stores, including what customers to prioritize, how to segment them and what stores to visit to make the highest impact. Instead of trying to measure numerous SKUs, which were not necessarily driving growth, reps now have streamlined information from Trax which tells them exactly which SKUs to focus on and what levers to pull at any given time.
Sanofi’s Perfect Store program is aimed at identifying the stores, brands and products with the highest growth potential in each market and developing guidelines for sales teams to execute the right strategy in these stores. Using Trax, Sanofi can now objectively measure their Perfect Store compliance: track basic KPIs such as route-plan compliance and must-stock list availability, to the more advanced metrics such as brand block, POSM presence, display execution and store quality.
Stores with perfect execution saw an uplift of 17% in sales compared with other stores.
Trax has helped us drive our perfect store program to the tip of everybody’s tongue. It is now a complete mindset shift for the organization where we now focus on executional excellence every day.
MARK JAGGER, HEAD OF COMMERCIAL AND BUSINESS OPERATIONS INTERNATIONAL
With Trax, Sanofi has gained a common platform to view in-store execution performance across various markets. The biggest benefit is seen within their Perfect Store programs – stores participating in this program have shown an 80 percent higher sales growth rate compared to other stores. Furthermore, the Perfect Store program has increased sales by 2 percent year-over-year in 2018. Trax Retail Execution is now an everyday tool for not just frontline teams but also any stakeholder who is involved in translating Sanofi’s mission of ensuring healthier lives at the point of purchase.
